How Do I Know if I’m Walking Hard Enough?
That’s an easy one. The ‘talk test’ is a really simple way of judging whether you are walking fast and hard enough. While you are walking, start talking (even to yourself!). Yes, people may stare but that’s their problem. If you can talk away as normal you can probably go faster or include more of an incline on your circuit. If you can still talk but need to catch your breath you are spot on and can keep going. If you can’t talk, have turned purple and keeled over, you are probably trying too hard.
Seriously, don’t go mad. Start gradually and build up to a level that just gets you feeling a little warmer and increases your breathing rate. At some point that level will feel quite normal and will require little or no effort. That’s the time to see if you can go faster, harder or longer.
So what’s stopping you? Rise to the Diet Freedom walk challenge – we know you can do it!
Now you’ve got everything you need to get started: you know how the diet works, you know how to make the 7-day plans work for you a week at a time, and you’re ready to start walking towards Diet Freedom – congratulations! Of course you have already taken the most positive step of all by starting to read this book – so well done!
We’d love to know how well you’re doing, so please do log on to the forums on our website and let us know.
PART II WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?
There’s a lot more to permanent weight control than just knowing what to eat. In this section we address getting your head in the right place to get started and KOKO – that’s keeping on keeping on once you’ve reached your goals. We also challenge you to find 1800 seconds a day to change your life forever …
You’ll find:
How to prepare your mind for the 7-day GL diet
How to set goals, achieve them and keep on keeping on – KOKO
How to get active – don’t panic! It’s easy!
“Finding Nigel Denby’s GL diet book in a tiny village bookstore was my happiest ever accident. At 55, I’d just started GI dieting after failing on two of the main ‘group-attendance’, point-counting UK diets. I wanted the dieting Holy Grail, enjoyable as well as easy to understand, without counting or crazy nutritional principles. In GL I found my freedom, as if a burden had fallen off my back.
Armed with Nigel’s clear explanation of nutritional principles and a few recommended new habits, I took baby steps in healthy eating rather than dieting, helped by the recipes and by learning from experience. I started to lose weight gradually and feel much better. I found the message-board on the website very supportive. The research team were responsive to my queries and uncertainties, and the shared wisdom, support and experience of many ex-dieters, now Diet Freedom Fighters, was invaluable. To us, the future is GL – a healthy, enjoyable way of life and weight management, easily shared with family and friends – rather than glum solo dieting.”
Marie M from Cambridge
Chapter 3 IT’S ALL IN THE MIND
Why do diets fail? Well, we’ve all been there. We’re all fired up and ready to go. It’s Monday morning, another weekend of overindulgence behind us, and it’s D-day – we’re about to start the diet!
Later that week, or even that day, things start to get a bit dodgy. Perhaps work is stressful, the kids are playing up, you’re tired, hungry, disorganized or a multitude of other reasons and it’s all too easy to decide the diet is just too hard or too much hassle. It then slips by the wayside, leaving us feeling lousy, disappointed, guilty and like a failure.
This probably sounds familiar to many of us … and is exactly what we’re talking about when we describe the ‘diet trap’: a cycle of preparing for a diet, starting a diet, stopping a diet and feeling guilty about it.
The problem is that we repeatedly just accept this cycle and put our failure down to things like:
I haven’t got any willpower.
I haven’t got time to fuss about with diet food.
I can only diet when everything is going smoothly in my life.
I could diet if I lived on my own.
I’ll diet when things calm down at work.
I’ll diet when my social life quietens down a bit.
Diets are really confusing – I just want something simple to follow.
Are these reasons or excuses for a diet failure? Well, they can be a bit of both, but what I see with so many of my patients, and from my own weight-loss experience, is that dieting behaviour is something we learn. The more times we go through that diet-trap cycle, the better we get at perfecting our destructive diet behaviour. Often the time it takes us to complete the cycle of starting the diet and feeling guilty about our failure gets shorter and shorter the more times we practise the cycle. In extreme cases this means that eventually some people don’t even get as far as starting the diet – they believe they will fail before they start so what’s the point in bothering at all?
All this can be changed. The diet-trap cycle can be broken right now, today, this second.
So, this is how to make the massive step out of your diet trap and turn your back on that miserable cycle forever …
Remember: ‘If you do what you always do, you’ll get what you always got!’
The first thing to do is accept that you have been stuck in a diet trap. If you’re not sure, go back over the previous paragraphs and see if you recognize your own behaviour there.
If you already know this applies to you, think about the last time you started a diet-trap cycle and work through the list of questions below to help you unravel what really happened. For some of the questions I’ve given you answers some of my patients give me. Highlight the answer which best fits your story, or write in your own if none of them are appropriate, and then read on for some suggestions and tips on how to overcome and change your dieting behaviour.
What sort of diet did you choose?
A diet from a magazine
A diet a friend or colleague recommended
I just tried to cut down
I went to a slimming club
I always follow the same diet when
I want to lose weight
Other ________________
How did you plan for it?
I didn’t
I told everyone I was on a diet and warned them not to temptme